As Agile2013 considers itself a best in class kind of conference “designed to provide all Agile Team Members, Developers, Managers and Executives with proven, practical knowledge”, the track committees select from a large pool of applicants and prefer vetted content that has worked its way up from local meetings to conferences. I have only one talk that fits this criteria since I presented Big Visible Testing as an emerging topic at CAST 2012. I developed several versions of this talk subsequent to that event and doing so had given me confidence that I would be able to provide valuable information in the time allotted and still leave enough time for attendees to ask questions and to give feedback on what information resonated with them.

I worked to carefully craft this proposal for the experience reports track, knowing that if I were selected that I would have a formal IEEE-style paper to write. Fortunately, my talk made the cut and I began the writing process with my intrepid “shepherd” Nanette Brown. I wasn’t sure where to begin with writing a formal paper, but Nanette encouraged me to simply begin to tell the story and worry about the formatting later. This proved to be wise advice since telling a compelling story is the most important task. Harkening back to my high school and early college papers, I found myself wading through different but largely similar drafts of my story. I experimented with choosing a different starting point for the paper that I ultimately discarded, but it had served its purpose in breaking through my writer’s block. Focusing on how the story would be valuable to my readers helped to hone in on sequencing and language selection. Once I had the prose sorted out, I began to shape the layout according to the publication standards and decided to include photographs from my presentation – the story is about big visible charts after all!

Investing sufficient time in the formal paper made preparing the presentation more about strong simple visuals. I have discovered my own interest in information visualization so prototyping different slide possibilities and testing them out with colleagues was (mostly) fun. I’m still not quitting my day job to go into slide deck production. Sorry to disappoint!

Performance anxiety

Despite all of this preparation, I couldn’t sit still at dinner the night before my presentation and barely slept that night. I woke before the sunrise and tried to school my mind to be calm, cool, and collected while the butterflies in my stomach were trying to escape. This was definitely the most challenging work of presenting!

As a first time speaker, I didn’t know what to expect, so I set my talk’s acceptance criteria as a rather low bar:

Someone shows up

No one hates it enough to leave a red card as feedback

When I walked into my room in the conference center, a lone Agile2013 attendee was waiting for me. Having him ready to go encouraged me to say hello to each of the people who came to my presentation, which in turn changed the people in the room from a terrifying Audience into many friends, both new and old. I think I managed not to speed through my slides despite my tendency to chatter when I’m nervous. I couldn’t stay trapped behind my podium and walked around to interact with my slides and to involve my audience more in the conversation. Sadly, I can’t share my energy with you since I forgot to record it. Oh well. Next time!

The vanity metrics

At 10 minutes into the presentation, 50 people had come to hear me speak and at 60 minutes I had somehow gained another 7 to end at 57 people. Thanks so much for your kind attention! I hope I made it worth your while…

43 people stopped to give me the simple good-indifferent-bad feedback of the color-coded cards (which I liked as a simple vote about a presentation) and I received 37 green cards and 6 yellow – with no red cards! Whoo hoo!

Words of Encouragement

Two people kindly wrote out specific feedback for me and I want to share that with you in detail, hoping to elicit some late feedback from attendees who might like to share at this point (Agree or disagree, I want to hear from you!)

Feedback Card #1:
– Best session so far!
– Great presenter – great information – great facilitator
– Would like to see future sessions by this speaker

Feedback Card #2:
Great Talk – speaker very endearing, Her passion for the subject matter is obvious.
A fresh perspective of how Developers and Testers should interact.
Should find ways to engage the audience

Someone else got a kick out of my saying, “I’m serious about my stickies.” and left their notes behind on the table after leaving. So thanks for sharing that. 🙂

One friend spoke to me afterward with some helpful feedback about word choice and non-native English speakers. When I was writing my talk, I was trying to focus on people who would be likely audience members, but I had not considered that aspect of the Agile2013 crowd. Since I was simply speaking off the cuff, I ended up using some words that would have fit in at our dinner table growing up but that would make for tougher translation. And yet, I got some wonderful feedback from Hiroyuki Ito about the “kaizen” he said I made. I can’t read it directly, but Google Translate assures me it’s good stuff. 🙂

uneasy truce

Finally, I discovered that my relationship with a linear slide deck is not a comfortable one. I wanted to be flexible in referencing each of the slides and having to sequence them hampered my ability to respond easily with visuals when discussing questions or improvising during my talk. I haven’t experimented with other presentation options, but I hope there’s an easy solution out there.

So there we were, Josh Gibbs and I, enjoying our lunch break on a lovely sunny day at Centennial Olympic Park. As an Atlanta native, I was living here when the olympics came through town and have a brick in the park. We took a little stroll to visit it and then settled down by the fountain to enjoy the Fountain of Rings show that happened to be scheduled at that time.

As we sat there absorbing the novel touristy experience, trying to identify the musical strains that blared from the speakers, we started to analyze it. We couldn’t help ourselves. That instinct to see beyond the surface, to reverse engineer the system through a verbal exchange, was too powerful for us to just be in the moment. This is why we can’t have nice things.

However, as we gazed upon these new and shifting patterns of water jets set to music, we noticed a flaw in the system. One water jet was misbehaving. At first, it seemed like some sort of counterpoint to the carefully orchestrated flow, perhaps a harmony in the song that I couldn’t properly detect. As the songs changed and that jet continued to spray, it became clear that it was out of turn.

So we started looking for rules we could test to explain the behavior systematically. We speculated that the jet was always on, but when the song ended the water completely died away. We proposed that this little jet was always spraying water, always turned on but only as long as any water was emerging from the fountain. When some jets were performing but the jets around it were not active, this jet bubbled closer to the ground, but as the jets around it reached for the sky the broken jet struggled and failed to follow suit. So that rule seemed to hold.

We considered the historical context of this fountain. Constructed for the 1996 olympics, the initial design had to be created with technology available at that time. So what kind of controls were determining where the water flowed, how long the water flowed (to produce the varying effects from a water ball to a towering jet), how hard the pressure was (to provide a jet of a particular height), how quickly the pattern could change, and so on? Had the original system been maintained all this time? How would you upgrade a system like that? Was there a fixed playlist with predetermined songs and water choreography or could someone provide new inputs? If you could submit a new sequence, was it possible to hack the fountain? And if so, what was the risk involved (likelihood, impact)?

When I was growing up, my family and I would watch shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos that often involved montages of people showing off their ridiculous talents – sometimes inadvertently!

One of my earliest experiences in my testing career was participating in a planning meeting. The whole product development team migrated to the corner of our open workspace where a large board-room-style table sat lonely on most days. We all pulled up chairs, but I was one of the attendees who also pulled up a laptop. I started typing up the details of what I was hearing and began asking questions, like I do. The most exciting moment of that planning meeting was the developers noticing that I was still furiously typing their responses to the previous question while moving on to another. Apparently typing one thing and saying another was my amazing stupid human trick. My keyboarding teacher would be so proud.

To this day, my fast fingers continue to amaze, as many physically present and online lurking CAST 2013 attendees can attest. So what’s the secret to my Twitter dominance? The Micro Machines ManJohn Moschitta, Jr. described his rapid speech delivery as just allowing the words to flow in through his eyes and out through his mouth, so my analogue is in through my eyes and ears and out through my fingers – though I’ll allow the 140 character constraint does require some synthesis along the way.

(So, yes, Claire, we’re all very impressed with your speedy typing, but is it really all that important? Is there a point behind your stupid human trick?)

I find that content generation is a valued skill, even when it’s just providing information from someone else via social media. Helping others to feel present and included is part of my hospitality charism and I want to bring that to bear in the context-driven testing community. I started out as an online lurker and eventually became a participant, but now I have the opportunity to be an amplifier. I like to think of myself as an information radiator, bringing valuable information to light. Now what will you radiate?